Category Archives: Covert Action

Post navigation

In a frightening move that is raising already precarious tensions, Pakistan has begun transferring troops and artillery away from the Afghanistan / northwestern Pakistan front to key points on its border with India, near Kashmir. According to at least some unnamed sources in Pakistan’s military and intelligence services, the move comes in response to new intelligence that India is preparing to launch a raid or attack as soon as early next week.

At this writing, the scale of Pakistan’s troop movements remains unclear, but the emerging news suggests it is significant. Reports from late Friday said “there was little to indicate that the troop movements constituted a major redeployment,” and in its Saturday edition the NY Times reported that “Several senior American officials said they had not seen evidence of major troop movements.”Â Yet.

However, the Associated Press on Sunday quoted two anonymous Pakistani intelligence sources as saying “a total of 20,000 soldiers — about one-fifth of the deployment in the tribal areas” were to be redeployed from Waziristan.Â While the sources gave no timeframe for how fast or slow the redeployment would be, the AP report said residents in that area are seeing massive and immediate movement.Â Mushtaq Bokhari, a resident near the Punjabi border with the North West Frontier Province, reported a “a big, big convoy.Â It took about three hours to pass through our city.”

Pakistani and international news reports indicate troops are being redeployed to Kasur and Sialkot (strategic points near hyper-sensitive Kashmir), and Lahore, the second-largest city in Pakistan, just 20 miles from the Indian border.Â This area of the country is the stronghold of Lashkar-e-Taiba and related groups which were responsible for the deadly Mumbai raid in which 163 were killed.Â It is also perilously close to the national capital of Islamabad.
The Kashmir-Lahore corridor is also the very same area where two weeks ago Indian warplanes crossed into Pakistani airspace, in two separate incidents occurring almost simultaneously.Â At the time, both governments made a public show of saying it was understood the incursions were “accidental,” but everyone understood the true message.Â At the very same time, there were eyewitness reports that “Long convoys of military trucks” comprised of “hundreds of medium and heavy artillery vehicles” were on the move in the area.Â The Times of India summarized Pakistani news reports that quoted travelers, motorists, and residents who had seen the large-scale artillery movements.

Regarding the current troop redeployment, in an article by Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Salman Masood, “Pakistan Moves Troops Amid Tension With India” (New York Times, Dec. 26, 2008), only a few Pakistani officials would speak and all insisted on anonymity.Â Somewhat conflicting versions emerged from those who did talk.

One senior Pakistani military official said the decision to move forces and restrict furloughs was made “in view of the prevailing environment,” namely deteriorating relations with India since the terrorist attacks. He added that the air force was “vigilant” and “alert” for the same reason.

…[But] Some of the Pakistani officials who spoke of the redeployment said it was partly a response to new intelligence that suggested India could launch an attack inside Pakistan by early next week. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity.

One senior Pakistani military official who said troops were being redeployed from the areas where government forces were engaging the Taliban, added that the soldiers who were leaving were “being pulled out of areas where no operations are being conducted,” or where winter weather had limited their ability to maneuver. He called the number of soldiers being moved “limited.”

He and another senior Pakistani military official interviewed Friday about the troop movements chose their words very carefully and offered few details. They said nothing harsh about India, even though they were speaking anonymously.

But two Pakistani intelligence officials â€” one from military intelligence and one from the country’s premier agency, Inter-Services Intelligence â€” described the situation in graver terms, and said troops along the border with India were on the highest state of alert.

Another Pakistani official said the air force had been in a “point defense” posture for one week, prepared to defend specific key defense installations and cities â€” including Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Lahore â€” as well as the Kahuta nuclear weapons laboratory. Pilots are sleeping in uniform with their boots on, the official said.

Meanwhile, at least some Pakistani officials are trying to keep a poker face.Â In the AP’s Sunday, Dec. 28, 2008 article, “a senior Pakistani security official denied that the troops were being deployed to the Indian border.”

“He said a ‘limited number’ of soldiers were being shifted from areas ‘where they were not engaged in any operations on the western border or from areas which were snowbound.’

“He declined further comment and asked that his name not be used, also citing the sensitivity of the situation.”

For it’s part, India — for the moment at least — is projecting a calm front even as there are reports that it too is moving troops to the border. On Saturday (Dec. 27), a spokesperson for India’s ministry of defense dismissed the reports as “baseless and speculative,” yet acknowledged there were maneuvers underway. According to a news item on the Indian Sify.com web portal:

“The Army headquarters has termed all such reports as baseless and speculative in nature,” Defence Ministry spokesperson Sitanshu Kar said.

He said the movements that had been reported were “normal” and “routine.” The Army units were currently training at a winter exercise in Rajasthan and Punjab, which they carry out every year, he added.Some other units were moving to Jammu and Kashmir as part of the regular turn over of troops in the state, he said.”Taking into consideration the climatic conditions of Rajasthan throughout the year, winter months are the best months for troops to practice manoeuvres and hence these annual training exercises,” Kar said.

The Committee concluded that the authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials was both a direct cause of detainee abuse and conveyed the message that it was okay to mistreat and degrade detainees in US custody.

In the course of its more than 18-month long investigation, the Committee reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents and conducted extensive interviews with more than 70 individuals.

A joint statement released by Levin and McCain emphasized the abuses were directly the result of decisions and orders made at the highest levels of the Bush Administration.Â “Attempts by senior officials to pass the buck to low ranking soldiers while avoiding any responsibility for abuses are unconscionable. The message from top officials was clear; it was acceptable to use degrading and abusive techniques against detainees,” Sen. Levin said in the statement.
The report’s executive summary, the only part to be released publicly, lays blame squarely at the feet of President Bush, former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and top generals (including Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller) who reinforced the message personally to their commands.

“Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeldâ€™s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody

“Matthew Alexander” (a pseudonym used “for security reasons”) wrote this recent Washington Post Op-Ed piece.Â According to the Post’s capsule bio, he “led an interrogations team assigned to a Special Operations task force in Iraq in 2006,” essentially batting clean-up after the Abu Ghraib scandal. Coincidentally, “Alexander” has written a new book: How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.

In a recent (Dec. 3, 2008) interview with Amy Goodman on her program Democracy Now, “Alexander” described excessive Pentagon censorship, including quotes from an unclassified field manual and even items directly from the Armyâ€™s own Web site.Â Out of 93 extensive redactions, 13 were rescinded following a law suit, but not in time for the first printing of the book.

I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I’m still alarmed about that today.

I’m not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me — both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn’t work.

Violence was at its peak during my five-month tour in Iraq. In February 2006, the month before I arrived, Zarqawi’s forces (members of Iraq’s Sunni minority) blew up the golden-domed Askariya mosque in Samarra, a shrine revered by Iraq’s majority Shiites, and unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed. Reprisal killings became a daily occurrence, and suicide bombings were as common as car accidents. It felt as if the whole country was being blown to bits.

Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators’ bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules — and often break them. I don’t have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology — one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they’re listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of “ruses and trickery”). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.

Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.

Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war’s biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi’s associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader’s location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.

But Zarqawi’s death wasn’t enough to convince the joint Special Operations task force for which I worked to change its attitude toward interrogations. The old methods continued. I came home from Iraq feeling as if my mission was far from accomplished. Soon after my return, the public learned that another part of our government, the CIA, had repeatedly used waterboarding to try to get information out of detainees.

I know the counter-argument well — that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that’s not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, “I thought you would torture me, and when you didn’t, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That’s why I decided to cooperate.”

Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there’s the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

After my return from Iraq, I began to write about my experiences because I felt obliged, as a military officer, not only to point out the broken wheel but to try to fix it. When I submitted the manuscript of my book about my Iraq experiences to the Defense Department for a standard review to ensure that it did not contain classified information, I got a nasty shock. Pentagon officials delayed the review past the first printing date and then redacted an extraordinary amount of unclassified material — including passages copied verbatim from the Army’s unclassified Field Manual on interrogations and material vibrantly displayed on the Army’s own Web site. I sued, first to get the review completed and later to appeal the redactions. Apparently, some members of the military command are not only unconvinced by the arguments against torture; they don’t even want the public to hear them.

My experiences have landed me in the middle of another war — one even more important than the Iraq conflict. The war after the war is a fight about who we are as Americans. Murderers like Zarqawi can kill us, but they can’t force us to change who we are. We can only do that to ourselves. One day, when my grandkids sit on my knee and ask me about the war, I’ll say to them, “Which one?”

Americans, including officers like myself, must fight to protect our values not only from al-Qaeda but also from those within our own country who would erode them. Other interrogators are also speaking out, including some former members of the military, the FBI and the CIA who met last summer to condemn torture and have spoken before Congress — at considerable personal risk.

We’re told that our only options are to persist in carrying out torture or to face another terrorist attack. But there truly is a better way to carry out interrogations — and a way to get out of this false choice between torture and terror.

I’m actually quite optimistic these days, in no small measure because President-elect Barack Obama has promised to outlaw the practice of torture throughout our government. But until we renounce the sorts of abuses that have stained our national honor, al-Qaeda will be winning. Zarqawi is dead, but he has still forced us to show the world that we do not adhere to the principles we say we cherish. We’re better than that. We’re smarter, too.

…Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, …are designed to destabilize the countryâ€™s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iranâ€™s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of â€œhigh-value targetsâ€ in the Presidentâ€™s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Meanwhile, there has been mounting pressure within the Bush Administration for a military strike against Iran, the extent of which is unclear but various accounts and recent developments suggest it would be a major one.

Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White Houseâ€™s concern about Iranâ€™s nuclear ambitions, but there is disagreement about whether a military strike is the right solution.

…The Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose chairman is Admiral Mike Mullen, were “pushing back very hard” against White House pressure to undertake a military strike against Iran, the person familiar with the Finding told me. Similarly, a Pentagon consultant who is involved in the war on terror said that “at least ten senior flag and general officers, including combatant commanders” — the four-star officers who direct military operations around the world — “have weighed in on that issue.”

The most outspoken of those officers is Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was the head of U.S. Central Command, and thus in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March [2008], Fallon resigned under pressure, after giving a series of interviews stating his reservations about an armed attack on Iran.

Read the latest article online. For further context, see also Hersh’s earlier reporting for The New Yorker on the Bush Administration’s covert policies viz. Iran:

“The Next Act” (Nov. 27, 2006) — The debate within the Bush Administration over the extent of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and how best to counter it.

“The Redirection” (March 5, 2007) — A major policy shift, or â€œredirection,â€ in the Bush Administrationâ€™s Middle East strategy. The redirection has brought the U.S. closer to an open confrontation with Iran and propelled it into the sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

“Shifting Targets” (Oct. 8, 2007) — The Bush Administrationâ€™s shifting policy toward Iran and the Pentagonâ€™s preparations for possible â€œsurgical strikesâ€ against key Iranian targets. Hersh discusses how the Bush Administration is seeking to redefine the war in Iraq as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran.

This week the El Paso Times ran a rare on the record interview with Mike McConnell. As the current National Intelligence Director, he is responsible for coordinating the entire US intelligence community (previously the job of the director of the CIA).

A complete transcript of the interview was published on the El Paso Times web site, and this is archived below.Â Though a couple passages read a little incoherently, remember that this is a raw transcript of an actual conversation.Â It also could’ve used one more pass by a copy editor.

The following is the transcript of a question and answer session with National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell.

Question: How much has President Bush or members of his administration formed your response to the FISA debate?

Answer: Not at all. When I came back in, remember my previous assignment was director of the NSA, so this was an area I have known a little bit about. So I came back in. I was nominated the first week of January. The administration had made a decision to put the terrorist surveillance program into the FISA court. I think that happened the 7th of Jan. So as I come in the door and I’m prepping for the hearings, this sort of all happened. So the first thing I want to know is what’s this program and what’s the background and I was pretty surprised at what I learned. First off, the issue was the technology had changed and we had worked ourselves into a position that we were focusing on foreign terrorist communications, and this was a terrorist foreigner in a foreign country. The issue was international communications are on a wire so all of a sudden we were in a position because of the wording in the law that we had to have a warrant to do that. So the most important thing to capture is that it’s a foreigner in a foreign country, required to get a warrant. Now if it were wireless, we would not be required to get a warrant. Plus we were limited in what we were doing to terrorism only and the last time I checked we had a mission called foreign intelligence, which should be construed to mean anything of a foreign intelligence interest, North Korea, China, Russia, Syria, weapons of mass destruction proliferation, military development and it goes on and on and on. So when I engaged with the administration, I said we’ve gotten ourselves into a position here where we need to clarify, so the FISA issue had been debated and legislation had been passed in the house in 2006, did not pass the Senate. Two bills were introduced in the Senate, I don’t know if it was co-sponsorship or two different bills, but Sen. (Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.) had a bill and Sen. Specter had a bill and it may have been the same bill, I don’t know, but the point is a lot of debate, a lot of dialogue. So, it was submitted to the FISA court and the first ruling in the FISA court was what we needed to do we could do with an approval process that was at a summary level and that was OK, we stayed in business and we’re doing our mission. Well in the FISA process, you may or may not be aware …

Q: When you say summary level, do you mean the FISA court?

A: The FISA court. The FISA court ruled presented the program to them and they said the program is what you say it is and it’s appropriate and it’s legitimate, it’s not an issue and was had approval. But the FISA process has a renewal. It comes up every so many days and there are 11 FISA judges. So the second judge looked at the same data and said well wait a minute I interpret the law, which is the FISA law, differently. And it came down to, if it’s on a wire and it’s foreign in a foreign country, you have to have a warrant and so we found ourselves in a position of actually losing ground because it was the first review was less capability, we got a stay and that took us to the 31st of May. After the 31st of May we were in extremis because now we have significantly less capability. And meantime, the community, before I came back, had been working on a National Intelligence Estimate on terrorist threat to the homeland. And the key elements of the terrorist threat to the homeland, there were four key elements, a resilient determined adversary with senior leadership willing to die for the cause, requiring a place to train and develop, think of it as safe haven, they had discovered that in the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now the Pakistani government is pushing and pressing and attempting to do something about it, but by and large they have areas of safe haven. So leadership that can adapt, safe haven, intermediate leadership, these are think of them as trainers, facilitators, operational control guys. And the fourth part is recruits. They have them, they’ve taken them. This area is referred to as the FATA, federally administered tribal areas, they have the recruits and now the objective is to get them into the United States for mass casualties to conduct terrorist operations to achieve mass casualties. All of those four parts have been carried out except the fourth. They have em, but they haven’t been successful. One of the major tools for us to keep them out is the FISA program, a significant tool and we’re going the wrong direction. So, for me it was extremis to start talking not only to the administration, but to members of the hill. So from June until the bill was passed, I think I talked to probably 260 members, senators and congressmen. We submitted the bill in April, had an open hearing 1 May, we had a closed hearing in May, I don’t remember the exact date. Chairman (U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas) had two hearings and I had a chance to brief the judiciary committee in the house, the intelligence committee in the house and I just mentioned the Senate, did not brief the full judiciary committee in the Senate, but I did meet with Sen. (Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.) and Sen. (Arlen Specter, R-Pa.), and I did have an opportunity on the Senate side, they have a tradition there of every quarter they invite the director of national intelligence in to talk to them update them on topics of interest. And that happened in (June 27). Well what they wanted to hear about was Iraq and Afghanistan and for whatever reason, I’m giving them my review and they ask questions in the order in which they arrive in the room. The second question was on FISA, so it gave me an opportunity to, here I am worrying about this problem and I have 41 senators and I said several things. The current threat is increasing, I’m worried about it. Our capability is decreasing and let me explain the problem.

Q: Can’t you get the warrant after the fact?

A: The issue is volume and time. Think about foreign intelligence. What it presented me with an opportunity is to make the case for something current, but what I was really also trying to put a strong emphasis on is the need to do foreign intelligence in any context. My argument was that the intelligence community should not be restricted when we are conducting foreign surveillance against a foreigner in a foreign country, just by dint of the fact that it happened to touch a wire. We haven’t done that in wireless for years.

Q: So you end up with people tied up doing paperwork?

A: It takes about 200 man hours to do one telephone number. Think about it from the judges standpoint. Well, is this foreign intelligence? Well how do you know it’s foreign intelligence? Well what does Abdul calling Mohammed mean, and how do I interpret that? So, it’s a very complex process, so now, I’ve got people speaking Urdu and Farsi and, you know, whatever, Arabic, pull them off the line have them go through this process to justify what it is they know and why and so on. And now you’ve got to write it all up and it goes through the signature process, take it through (the Justice Department), and take it down to the FISA court. So all that process is about 200 man hours for one number. We’re going backwards, we couldn’t keep up. So the issue was …

Q: How many calls? Thousands?

A: Don’t want to go there. Just think, lots. Too many. Now the second part of the issue was under the president’s program, the terrorist surveillance program, the private sector had assisted us. Because if you’re going to get access you’ve got to have a partner and they were being sued. Now if you play out the suits at the value they’re claimed, it would bankrupt these companies. So my position was we have to provide liability protection to these private sector entities. So that was part of the request. So we went through that and we argued it. Some wanted to limit us to terrorism. My argument was, wait a minute, why would I want to limit it to terrorism. It may be that terrorists are achieving weapons of mass destruction, the only way I would know that is if I’m doing foreign intelligence by who might be providing a weapon of mass destruction.

Q: And this is still all foreign to foreign communication?

A: All foreign to foreign. So, in the final analysis, I was after three points, no warrant for a foreigner overseas, a foreign intelligence target located overseas, liability protection for the private sector and the third point was we must be required to have a warrant for surveillance against a U.S. person. And when I say U.S. person I want to make sure you capture what that means. That does not mean citizen. That means a foreigner, who is here, we still have to have a warrant because he’s here. My view is that that’s the right check and balances and it’s the right protection for the country and lets us still do our mission for protection of the country. And we’re trying to fend off foreign threats.

Q: So are you satisfied with it the way it is now?

A: I am. The issue that we did not address, which has to be addressed is the liability protection for the private sector now is proscriptive, meaning going forward. We’ve got a retroactive problem. When I went through and briefed the various senators and congressmen, the issue was alright, look, we don’t want to work that right now, it’s too hard because we want to find out about some issues of the past. So what I recommended to the administration is, ‘Let’s take that off the table for now and take it up when Congress reconvenes in September.’

Q: With an eye toward the six-month review?

A: No, the retroactive liability protection has got to be addressed.

Q: And that’s not in the current law?

A: It is not. Now people have said that I negotiated in bad faith, or I did not keep my word or whatever…

Q: That you had an agenda that you weren’t honest about.

A: I’ll give you the facts from my point of view. When I checked on board I had my discussion with the president. I’m an apolitical figure. I’m not a Republican, I’m not a Democrat. I have voted for both. My job is as a professional to try to do this job the best way I can in terms of, from the intelligence community, protect the nation. So I made my argument that we should have the ability to do surveillance the same way we’ve done it for the past 50 years and not be inhibited when it’s a foreigner in a foreign country. The president’s guidance to me early in the process, was, ‘You’ve got the experience. I trust your judgement. You make the right call. There’s no pressure from anybody here to tell you how to do it. He did that early. He revisited with me in June. He did it again in July and he said it publicly on Friday before the bill was passed. We were at the FBI, it’s an annual thing, we go to the FBI and do a homeland security kind of update. So he came out at noon and said, ‘I’m requesting that Congress pass this bill. It’s essential. Do it before you go on recess. I’m depending on Mike McConnell’s recommendations. And that was the total sum and substance of the guidance and the involvement from the White House with regard to how I should make the call. Now, as we negotiated, we started with 66 pages, were trying to get everything cleaned up at once. When I reduced it to my three points, we went from 66 pages to 11. Now, this is a very, very complex bill. I had a team of 20 lawyers working. You can change a word in a paragraph and end up with some major catastrophe down in paragraph 27, subsection 2c, to shut yourself down, you’ll be out of business. So when we send up our 11 pages, we had a lot of help in making sure we got it just right so it would come back and we’d say wait a minute we can’t live with this or one of the lawyers would say, ‘Wait we tried that, it won’t work, here’s the problem.’ So we kept going back and forth, so we sent up a version like Monday, we sent up a version on Wednesday, we sent up a version on Thursday. The House leadership, or the Democratic leadership on Thursday took that bill and we talked about it. And my response was there are some things I can’t live with in this bill and they said alright we’re going to fix them. Now, here’s the issue. I never then had a chance to read it for the fix because, again, it’s so complex, if you change a word or phrase, or even a paragraph reference, you can cause unintended …

Q: You have to make sure it’s all consistent?

A: Right. So I can’t agree to it until it’s in writing and my 20 lawyers, who have been doing this for two years, can work through it. So in the final analysis, I was put in the position of making a call on something I hadn’t read. So when it came down to crunch time, we got a copy and it had some of the offending language back in it. So I said, ‘I can’t support it.’ And it played out in the House the way it played out in the House. Meantime on the Senate side, there were two versions being looked at. The Wednesday version and the Thursday version. And one side took one version and the other side took the other version. The Thursday version, we had some help, and I didn’t get a chance to review it. So now, it’s Friday night, the Senate’s voting. They were having their debate and I still had not had a chance to review it. So, I walked over, I was up visiting some senators trying to explain some of the background. So I walked over to the chamber and as I walked into the office just off the chamber, it’s the vice president’s office, somebody gave me a copy. So I looked at the version and said, ‘Can’t do it. The same language was back in there.’

Q: What was it?

A: Just let me leave it, not too much detail, there were things with regard to our authorities some language around minimization. So it put us in an untenable position. So then I had another version to take a look at, which was our Wednesday version, which basically was unchanged. So I said, well certainly, I’m going to support that Wednesday version. So that’s what I said and the vote happened in the Senate and that was on Friday. So now it rolled to the House on Saturday. They took up the bill, they had a spirited debate, my name was invoked several times, not in a favorable light in some cases. (laughs) And they took a vote and it passed 226 to 182, I think. So it’s law. The president signed it on Sunday and here we are.

Q: That’s far from unanimous. There’s obviously going to be more debate on this.

A: There are a couple of issues to just be sensitive to. There’s a claim of reverse targeting. Now what that means is we would target somebody in a foreign country who is calling into the United States and our intent is to not go after the bad guy, but to listen to somebody in the United States. That’s not legal, it’s, it would be a breach of the Fourth Amendment. You can go to jail for that sort of thing. And If a foreign bad guy is calling into the United States, if there’s a need to have a warrant, for the person in the United States, you just get a warrant. And so if a terrorist calls in and it’s another terrorist, I think the American public would want us to do surveillance of that U.S. person in this case. So we would just get a warrant and do that. It’s a manageable thing. On the U.S. persons side it’s 100 or less. And then the foreign side, it’s in the thousands. Now there’s a sense that we’re doing massive data mining. In fact, what we’re doing is surgical. A telephone number is surgical. So, if you know what number, you can select it out. So that’s, we’ve got a lot of territory to make up with people believing that we’re doing things we’re not doing.

Q: Even if it’s perception, how do you deal with that? You have to do public relations, I assume.

A: Well, one of the things you do is you talk to reporters. And you give them the facts the best you can. Now part of this is a classified world. The fact we’re doing it this way means that some Americans are going to die, because we do this mission unknown to the bad guys because they’re using a process that we can exploit and the more we talk about it, the more they will go with an alternative means and when they go to an alternative means, remember what I said, a significant portion of what we do, this is not just threats against the United States, this is war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Q. So you’re saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?

A. That’s what I mean. Because we have made it so public. We used to do these things very differently, but for whatever reason, you know, it’s a democratic process and sunshine’s a good thing. We need to have the debate. The reason that the FISA law was passed in 1978 was an arrangement was worked out between the Congress and the administration, we did not want to allow this community to conduct surveillance, electronic surveillance, of Americans for foreign intelligence unless you had a warrant, so that was required. So there was no warrant required for a foreign target in a foreign land. And so we are trying to get back to what was the intention of ’78. Now because of the claim, counterclaim, mistrust, suspicion, the only way you could make any progress was to have this debate in an open way.

Q. So you don’t think there was an alternative way to do this?

A. There may have been an alternative way, but we are where are …

Q. A better way, I should say.

A. All of my briefs initially were very classified. But it became apparent that we were not going to be able to carry the day if we don’t talk to more people.

Q. Some might say that’s the price you pay for living in a free society. Do you think that this is necessary that these Americans die?

A. We could have gotten there a different way. We conducted intelligence since World War II and we’ve maintained a sensitivity as far as sources and methods. It’s basically a sources and methods argument. If you don’t protect sources and methods then those you target will choose alternative means, different paths. As it is today al-Qaida in Iraq is targeting Americans, specifically the coalition. There are activities supported by other nations to import electronic, or explosively formed projectiles, to do these roadside attacks and what we know about that is often out of very sensitive sources and methods. So the more public it is, then they take it away from us. So that’s the tradeoff.

DIVERSITY IN THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

Q: I wanted to ask you about the diversity question. This has major ramifications here, we have this center of excellence program that’s recruiting high school kids, many of whom wouldn’t qualify if first generation American citizens weren’t allowed.

A: So you agree with me?

Q: It does sound like something that would benefit this area that would also allow you to get people from here who are bicultural and have an openness to seeing things …

A: You’re talking about Hispanics?

Q: Yes.

A: Hispanics are probably the most under-represented group if you think of America, what the ethic makeup of America, Hispanics are the most under-represented group in my community. Now, that said, and should increase that Hispanic population and programs like this will do that. That’s why the outreach. But also we need, particularly with the current problem of terrorism, we need to have speakers of Urdu and Farsi and Arabic and people from those cultures that understand the issues of tribes and clans and all the things that go with understanding that part of the world. Varying religions and so on. Because it is, it’s almost impossible, I’ve had the chance to live in the Middle East for years, I’ve studied it for years, it’s impossible to understand it without having some feel for the culture and so on. So while I’m all for increasing the diversity along the lines we talked about, I’m also very much in favor of first generation Americans from the countries that are causing issues and problems.

Q: What is the status of that program.

A: It is not in statue. It is not in policy. It has been habit. So we’ve stated, as a matter of policy, that we’re not going to abide by those habits.

Q: And that’s already the case?

A: Yes, and are we making progress? Not fast enough, but we will make progress over time.

Q: How do you measure that?

A: Very simple, you get to measure what are you and where are you trying go and are you making progress. I wrestled with this years ago when I was NSA ….

Q: You don’t want quotas, though?

A: Quotas are forbidden so we set goals. My way of thinking about it is what is your end state? Now some would say that federal governments should look like America, whatever that is. OK, that sounded like a reasonable metric, so I said, ‘Alright, what does America look like?’ So I got a bunch of numbers. I said, ‘Alright, what do we look like?’ and it didn’t match, and as I just told you, the one place where there’s the greatest mismatch is Hispanic. It’s much closer, as matter of fact, people would be surprised how close it is across, at least my community among the other minorities. Now, that said, numbers don’t necessarily equal positioning in the organization. So that’s another feature we have to work on, is placement of women and minorities in leadership positions.

Q: So, you’re quantifying that as well?

A: Yes.

TERRORIST ACTIVITY ON THE NATION’S SOUTHWEST BORDER

Q: There seems to be very little terrorist-related activity on the Southwest border, which is watched very closely because of the illegal immigration issue. Can you talk about why it’s important to be alert here?

A: Let me go back to my NIE, those are unclassified key judgements, pull them down and look at them. You’ve got committed leadership. You’ve got a place to train. They’ve got trainers and they’ve got recruits. The key now is getting recruits in. So if the key is getting recruits in. So, if you’re key is getting recruits in, how would you do that? And so, how would you do that?

Q: I’d go to the northern border where there’s nobody watching.

A: And that’s a path. Flying in is a path. Taking a ship in is a path. Coming up through the Mexican border is a path. Now are they doing it in great numbers, no. Because we’re finding them and we’re identifying them and we’ve got watch lists and we’re keeping them at bay. There are numerous situations where people are alive today because we caught them (terrorists). And my point earlier, we catch them or we prevent them because we’ve got the sources and methods that lets us identify them and do something about it. And you know the more sources and methods are compromised, we have that problem.

Q: And in many cases we don’t hear about them?

A: The vast majority you don’t hear about. Remember, let me give you a way to think about this. If you’ve got an issue, you have three potential outcomes, only three. A diplomatic success, an operational success or an intelligence failure. Because all those diplomatic successes and operations successes where there’s intelligence contribution, it’s not an intelligence success. It’s just part of the process. But if there’s an intelligence failure …

Q: Then you hear about it.

A: So, are terrorists coming across the Southwest border? Not in great numbers.

Q: There are some cases?

A: There are some. And would they use it as a path, given it was available to them? In time they will.

Q: If they’re successful at it, then they’ll probably repeat it.

A: Sure. There were a significant number of Iraqis who came across last year. Smuggled across illegally.

Q: Where was that?

A: Across the Southwest border.

Q: Can you give me anymore detail?

A: I probably could if I had my notebook. It’s significant numbers. I’ll have somebody get it for you. I don’t remember what it is.

Q: The point is it went from a number to (triple) in a single year, because they figured it out. Now some we caught, some we didn’t. The ones that get in, what are they going to do? They’re going to write home. So, it’s not rocket science, word will move around. There’s a program now in South America, where you can, once you’re in South American countries, you can move around in South America and Central America without a visa. So you get a forged passport in Lebanon or where ever that gets you to South America. Now, no visa, you can move around, and with you’re forged passport, as a citizen of whatever, you could come across that border. So, what I’m highlighting is that something …

A former U.S. Army sergeant who trained Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards and helped plan the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya was a U.S. government informant during much of his terrorist career, according to [US government] sources familiar with his case.

…[Ali] Mohamed, 49 [in 2001], is a former Egyptian Army major, fluent in Arabic and English, who after his arrest became known as bin Laden’s “California connection.” Last year [in 2000], when he pleaded guilty in the embassy bombing case, he told a federal judge that he first was drawn to terrorism in 1981, when he joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist group implicated in that year’s assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

For almost as long as he was a terrorist, Mohamed also was in contact with U.S. intelligence, according to court records and sources.

In 1984, he quit the Egyptian Army to work as a counterterrorism security expert for EgyptAir. After that, he offered to become a CIA informant, said the U.S. government official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“The agency tried him out, but because he told other possible terrorists or people possibly associated with terrorist groups that he was working for the CIA, clearly he was not suitable,” the official said.

The CIA cut off contact with Mohamed and put his name on a “watch list” aimed at blocking his entrance to the United States, according to the official.

Nevertheless, Mohamed got a visa one year later. He ultimately became a U.S. citizen after marrying a Santa Clara woman. In 1986, he joined the U.S. Army as an enlisted man. He was posted to Fort Bragg, N.C., home of the elite Special Forces.

There he worked as a supply sergeant for a Green Beret unit, then as an instructor on Middle Eastern affairs in the John F. Kennedy special warfare school.

…In 1989, Mohamed left the Army and returned to Santa Clara, where he worked as a security guard and at a home computer business.

Between then and his 1998 arrest, he said in court last year, Mohamed was deeply involved in bin Laden’s al Qaeda. He spent months abroad, training bin Laden’s fighters in camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. While in Africa, he scouted the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, target of the 1998 bombing. In this country, he helped al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s top aide, enter the country with a fake passport and tour U.S. mosques, raising money later funneled to al Qaeda.

According to Steven Emerson, a terrorism expert and author who has written about the case, Mohamed by the early 1990s had also established himself as an FBI informant.

“He agreed to serve (the FBI) and provide information, but in fact he was working for the bad guys and insulating himself from scrutiny from other law enforcement agencies,” Emerson said in an interview.

One particularly troubling aspect of the case, Emerson says, was that Mohamed’s role as an FBI informant gave bin Laden important insights into U.S. efforts to penetrate al Qaeda.

…In 1993, [a 1998 FBI] affidavit says, Mohamed was questioned by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after a bin Laden aide was caught trying to enter the United States with Mohamed’s driver’s license and a false passport.

Mohamed acknowledged traveling to Vancouver to help the terrorist sneak into the United States and admitted working closely with bin Laden’s group. Yet he was so unconcerned about being arrested that he told the Mounties he hoped the interview wouldn’t hurt his chances of getting a job as an FBI interpreter.

(According to the affidavit, he had indeed applied for the FBI position but never got it.)

Later that year, Mohamed — again seemingly without concern for consequences — told the FBI that he had trained bin Laden followers in intelligence and anti-hijacking techniques in Afghanistan, the affidavit says.

In January 1995, Mohamed applied for a U.S. security clearance, in hopes of becoming a security guard with a Santa Clara defense contractor. His application failed to mention ever traveling to Pakistan or Afghanistan, trips he had told the FBI about earlier. In three interviews with Defense Department officials, who conducted a background check on him, he claimed he had never been a terrorist.

“I have never belonged to a terrorist organization, but I have been approached by organizations that could be called terrorist,” he told the interviewers.

According to the affidavit, he told FBI agents in 1997 that he had trained bin Laden’s bodyguards, saying he loved bin Laden and believed in him. Mohamed also said it was “obvious” that the United States was the enemy of Muslim people.

…“I think you or I would have a better chance of winning Powerball (a lottery), than an Egyptian major in the unit that assassinated Sadat would have getting a [US] visa, getting to California…getting into the Army and getting assigned to a Special Forces unit,” [Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, Mohamed's former commanding officer at Ft. Bragg] said. “That just doesn’t happen. “

Well…except it did. And more than five years later, most folks have no idea about it.

Ali Mohamed and his role as an Al Qaida mole within the US intelligence infrastructure is the subject of Triple Cross, a mammoth new book by Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist Peter Lance. I’ve not read the book (I’m waiting for the paperback edition, which I suspect will be revised and updated to whatever extent), so I can’t offer an opinion about it. But I’ve read portions of his two previous books related to 9/11 — 1,000 Years for Revenge and Cover Up: What the Government is Still Hiding About the War on Terror — and I would say that while he sometimes evinces a slight lean to the sensational and not-so-well-written (which I take to be a shadow of his broadcast journalism background), he’s not the conspiracy nut one might initially take him for. He digs up very interesting information and raises very pointed — and eminently relevant — questions.

It’s probably obligatory to mention this (unquestionably biased) blog post by Larry C. Johnson, which seeks to discredit Lance and Triple Cross, in part by quoting from (and posting PDFs of) interrogation reports related to one Hakim Murad — whose relevance to the core tale is not made evident and, like I say, since I ain’t read the book I couldn’t tell ya. In this context, it’s worth noting that — in addition to getting very personal and nasty in his follow-up comments — Mr. Johnson beats his breast about a quote by Johnson that Lance apparently falsely cites as appearing in a NY Times op-ed piece on some date or other. In fact, the quote in question definitely does not appear in said cited op-ed piece, and Mr. Johnson thus calls Mr. Lance “a liar” and more than implying that he never uttered such words ever, amen. However, it turns out that Mr. Johnson did in fact utter the quote, which was indeed published in a NY Times article but on a different date and not in an op-ed piece. So while Mr. Lance is rightly chastised for poor citation work, Mr. Johnson’s own demonstrably selective assertions in the matter definitely make one wonder about his own agenda (especially since Mr. Johnson served as a counter-terrorism expert for the current Bush administration).

Piffle and whatever. Ali Mohamed — and just what the US government had to do with him and why — is obviously worth learning much more about.

As reported today on the national wires (“Bush says feds can open mail without warrant,” Seattle Times 4 Jan 07), Congress just passed a law specifically prohibiting the government from opening private mail without a warrant — a judge’s warrant, not an “administrative” one — and on Dec. 20, as Washington shut down for Christmas, President Bush quietly signed it.

BUT.Â “He then issued a ‘signing statement’ that declared his right to open mail under emergency conditions, contrary to existing law and contradicting the bill he had just signed,” according to the story.Â It continues:

Bush said he will “construe” an exception, “which provides for opening of an item of a class of mail otherwise sealed against inspection in a manner consistent…with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances.”

Bush cited as examples the need to “protect human life and safety against hazardous materials and the need for physical searches specifically authorized by law for foreign intelligence collection.”

Of course, the problem is that “exigent” basically means anything the Bush Administration wants (we are at war, don’t forget) — which is precisely why the outgoing Republican Congress put it in the damn law in the first damn place.

Predictably, the low-level White House flacks sent out are mumbling the “not assuming any new powers” mantra, but national security specialists and officials alike are shocked and concerned.

“The [Bush] signing statement claims authority to open domestic mail without a warrant, and that would be new and quite alarming,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.

“You have to be concerned,” a senior U.S. official agreed. “It takes executive-branch authority beyond anything we’ve ever known.”

And I’m totally serious about the impeachment thing.Â Pending election, my foot.Â The man swore a binding oath to “uphold and protect the Constitution.”Â I’d say active subversion outranks blowjobs on the indictment scale any day of the week.Â I mean, c’mon.
If you haven’t already, read up on this “signing statement” phenomenon and watch for it in the papers.

On Monday, Oct. 23, 2006, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (a sad pale shadow of its former self) ran a front-page, above-the-fold article with large color photo of none other than 1970s CIA figure Edwin P. Wilson.

“Former CIA spy branded a traitor wants to clear his name” by Tracy Johnson is a portrait of Wilson today, released in 2004 from the maximum security prison at Marion, IL, the asshole of the solitary confinement prison system. A Federal judge decreed that the government had knowingly withheld vital evidence damaging to their case and, worse, presented false testimony. Reporter Johnson traces Wilson’s impossible-but-true history, while following him around his Seattle office and his home somewhere around Edmonds.

Surrounded by great stacks of boxed documents, Edwin Wilson seeks to clear his name through lawsuits against individuals in the CIA that he says know the truth about Wilson’s relationship with the Agency. This is an important point, of course, because Wilson was sentenced to national security prison for trading arms with the Libyans, which was indeed a very serious crime at the time. However, Wilson has maintained he was making the deals with the approval and even encouragement of the CIA, in an effort to gain more intelligence inside the network. The US government has always steadfastly disavowed any such sanction. Evidently, the judge in 2004 saw it a little differently.

As I say, Wilson’s story is a complicated one. In addition to the arms trading and espionage, he has also been convicted of paying to hire a hit man to kill a prosecuter and others involved in his case. The key payment to the hit man was actually handed over by one of Wilson’s sons. He, too, was convicted and sentenced to prison, though he was later released. According to Johnson’s account, the two have not been in touch since the trial.
And even that is only the tip of the ice berg.

As discussed in a previous post, Col. James Steele is currently Counselor to the U.S. Ambassador for Iraqi Security Forces. Some of these forces are known to be involved in death squad activity in Iraq. During the mid-1980s, Col. Steele was assigned to El Salvador, where he led the US Military Advisory Group, commanding special “counter-insurgent” forces at the brigade level.

According to a wide array of evidence, Col. Steele helped direct Salvadoran military death squads and torture, and was involved to some extent in Iran-Contra.
Following are number of bibliographic citations related to Col. Steele, courtesy of Namebase.org.